ALFILM SELECTION

This year’s 15th ALFILM Selection presents a program that is more diverse than ever, with feature and short films from a total of 13 different Arab countries, among them Sudan with Goodbye Julia (Mohamed Kordofani, 2023), Saudi Arabia with Mandoob (Ali Kalthami, 2023), Jordan with Inshallah a Boy (Amjad Al Rasheed, 2023), Yemen with The Burdened (Amr Gamal, 2023), the United Arab Emirates with Yellow Bus (Wendy Bednarz, 2023), Iraq with My Lost Country (Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez, 2022), etc. 

Marking the 15th anniversary of the festival, the ALFILM Selection highlights the richness, artistic merit, and timely relevance of contemporary Arab cinema.

The Palestinian documentary Bye Bye Tiberias by Lina Soualem in its Berlin premiere will open the three program sections of the 15th edition of ALFILM – the ALFILM Selection, ALFILM Spotlight and the Special Program 15 Years ALFILM – 15 Years Arab Cinema in Berlin. In this film, acclaimed Palestinian actress Hiam Abbas returns with filmmaker daughter Lina to her home village of Deir Hanna to journey through scattered memories of four generations of daring Palestinian women. Through poignant testimonies, historical archive footage, home videos, photos, and letters, Bye Bye Tiberias offers a compelling exploration of the enduring struggles faced by Palestinians over decades.

Bye Bye Tiberias is also one of many films from the 15th ALFILM Selection centered around the identity quests of Arab filmmakers living in the diaspora. The protagonists of Background (Khaled Abdulwahed, 2023), My Lost Country (Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez, 2022), Q (Jude Chehab, 2023) or Six Feet Over (Karim Bensalah, 2023), grapple with the notion of belonging while unraveling the intricate tapestries of their family’s histories and cultural traditions.

Another common thread links a big number of recent productions that made their way into the 15th ALFILM Selection: these films focus on representations of individual destinies susceptible to multifaceted dynamics of marginalization, stigmatization, and exclusion. They are featured in a special segment titled persona non grata, a Latin phrase meaning “unwelcome person”. Persona non grata is also a legal term referring to “a person who is not wanted or welcome in a particular country, because they are unacceptable to its government”1 , therefore describing a shared sentiment of the protagonists in this program segment.

Parallel to the 15th ALFILM Spotlight Here is Elsewhere: Palestine in Arab Cinema and Beyond, and echoing the feeling of rejection Palestinian and Arab communities are facing nowadays in the West, in general, and in Germany, in particular, due essentially to the refusal, in the mainstream discourse, of their views on the Middle-eastern conflict, the narrative of the films presented in this special segment are centered around leading characters who are not wanted in the societies in which they live. The treatment of their story takes into account the racial, gendered and socio-economical structures that nourish stigma and marginalization on the one hand, and feature on the other hand individual attempts to resist, navigate through boundaries and reclaim one’s own narratives. 

In the Lebanese documentary Embodied Chorus (Mohamad Moe Sabbah and Danielle Davie, 2023), the persona non grata are protagonists who have contracted sexually transmitted diseases. As such, they have to face societal taboos on a daily basis. They come together to raise their voices against stigma and reclaim their rightful place in a country that does not accept them. In Goodbye Julia by Mohamed Kordofani (2023), taking place in Khartoum during the last years of Sudan as a united country, it is the South Sudanese, represented by the figure of Julia (Siran Riak), that are depicted as persona non grata. In an interview given to Variety, Kordofani declares that his film was the result of his realization that the people of South Sudan “are feeling like second-class citizens in their own country” and of his need to give them a voice and stop being complicit in their oppression2.

Migrants are one of the biggest groups depicted as persona non grata in this special segment. In Dirty, Difficult, Dangerous (Wissam Charaf, 2022), the hardships that Ethiopian domestic workers and Syrian refugees face in Lebanon are at the center of the storyline, whereas Yellow Bus (Wendy Bednarz, 2023) engages with the struggles of the Indian communities living in the Arab Gulf states.

Furthermore, in a time where far-right parties and ideologies are gaining more and more power globally, especially in Europe, immigrants, particularly from the Arab world, are increasingly becoming persona non grata in the West. Shedding light on their plights and centring the narratives around their journeys to Europe, the racism they face, and their efforts to find their place in societies in which they often do not feel welcomed, films like Notes on Displacement (Khaled Jarrar, 2023), Geology of Separation (Yosr Gasmi and Mauro Mazzocchi, 2023), The Voice of Others (Fatima Kaci, 2023), Les Chenilles (Michelle and Noel Keserwany, 2023), or Casablanca (Adriano Valerio, 2023) re-humanize their main protagonists through poignant and compelling storylines that revolve around their life trajectories and their complex identities in relation to their countries of origin and their current places of residency.

Last but not least, two short film programs, A Different Tomorrow and Those Who Remain, with productions from Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt will complement the 15th ALFILM Selection.

Pascale Fakhry
Festival Director

1. According to the Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of personal non grata, cf.
2. In “Mohamed Kordofani, Writer-Director of Sudanese Oscar Entry ‘Goodbye Julia,’ on Racism, Tear Gas and Thinking Big” by John Bleasdale, https://variety.com/2023/film/global/goodbye-julia-mohamed-kordofani-1235843878/

Films of the 15th ALFILM SELECTION